After Chef Alan Wong and his crew did the cookout at Hamakua Springs last month, they went down to Ka‘u to meet some of the farmers there.  Alan tasted the coffee that Thomas “Bull” and Jamie Kailiawa grow and harvest, and he immediately said, “Hey, send me some.” He ordered ten pounds on the spot. We all know that Chef Alan has a special talent in terms of tasting.

Last week his taste buds were validated –  Bull and Jamie Kailiawa’s Ka‘u coffee placed in the Top Ten in an international cupping competition held by the Specialty Coffee Association of America in Atlanta.

Their coffee was the only coffee from Hawai‘i to place, and it was up against the finest coffees of the world – coffees from Colombia, Panama, Ethiopia and other renowned growing regions. Their Kailiawa Coffee ranked seventh best in the world.

Imagine – a coffee growing in the hills of Pahala ranking as one of the world’s finest coffees.

Bull was born and raised at Mill Camp in Pahala, graduated from Ka‘u High School in 1981 and worked at the sugar plantation as a harvester and later a crane operator.

Jamie and Bull Kailiawa, with nephew Lyndon “Baba” Kailiawa-George in center

When the sugar plantation was poised to shut down, Bull moved to Hilo where he worked as a crane operator, operated his own landscaping business, and worked his way up the ropes to head security at Hilo Pier where cruise ships come in. He and his wife also ran a catering business, and he worked nights at restaurants, doing cooking, cleaning and security – but all he wanted was to go back home to Pahala.

When his aunties needed help with their coffee farm at Moa‘ula, they went, and ultimately the aunties turned the farm over to him. It’s a beautiful farm, with views of the ocean and steep hillsides, and an imu and waterfalls and rushing water.

“One thing good with my field,” he says, “is that my trees always get something to drink. Before noon there is mist and in the afternoons, it rains most every day.” Where they are, he says, the season is long, and while most farmers are pruning their coffee trees, his coffee is flowering again.

He says he learned about growing coffee by asking questions of other coffee farmers and putting it all together. This season, they netted almost 5000 pounds of parchment.

Bull acknowledges his nephew, Lyndon “Baba” Kailiawa-George, a ninth-grader who Bull says “has been my partner in work from the very beginning.”

The Kailiawas also do ranch work, raise chickens, and trade coffee for beef and pretty much any other food they need.

“It’s terrific that the highest ranking coffee in the state, the coffee recognized as having the highest quality, is grown by this Hawaiian guy,” says Richard. “And he’s just a regular guy. A former sugar cane worker who hunts and fishes and that kind of thing. Not a gentleman farmer.”

Congratulations to Bull, Jamie and Baba!

If the Tomato Recipe Contest was Chapter 1 in our interesting times of this past week, here’s Chapter 2.

You already read about Chef Alan Wong judging at our Tomato Recipe Contest the other day. Now let me tell you about something else he just did in conjunction with the farm.

Chef Alan, who is based on O‘ahu, regularly buys produce for his restaurants from Hamakua Springs as well as a few other farms here on the Hamakua Coast. And every year he flies his staff here – chefs and other staff from his different restaurants – for a couple days.

The purpose of his annual visit? To visit the farms, and the farmers, who produce the fresh, delicious ingredients they work with every day. Chef Alan has a personal connection with the sources of his food, and he wants his chefs and other employees to know where the food comes from too, and who grows it, and how, so they can take that knowledge back with them. So they visit each farm, see how the food grows and get to know the farmers a little.

Then the culmination of their visit is that all his restaurant people and all the farmers gather at Hamakua Springs for an absolutely world-class Alan Wong cookout using ingredients from those local farms. It’s Chef Alan’s unbelievably gracious and generous (and delicious) thank you to the farmers.

This year for the first time there was also an imu. On Monday afternoon Kimo and his good friend Al Jardine prepared the imu, filling it with pig, turkey, beef, taro, sweet potato and more.

Chef Alan put some nontraditional ingredients in the imu, too. Lesley Hill and Michael Crowell, of nearby Wailea Ag Group,
brought big long “trunks” of heart of palm to put into the imu as an
experiment (they were delicious).

Here’s how it looked after they opened the imu the next day and were taking the meat and other foods out. That’s Mrs. Ha there, Richard’s mom. She’s great.

Here they are, chopping up the cooked meat. That’s Al in the blue shirt and Kimo in the red.

We all gathered at the farm’s recently reclaimed green shack. We’ll tell you more about that historical building on the edge of Hamakua Springs later – it has a story, too. For now we’ll just say that it was the HQ for food preparation. See all the beautiful old photos of former plantation days? They tell some of the story of what plantation life used to look like.

So everybody gathered the food from the imu and took it inside, where tables were set up and Chef Alan and staff cooked and set up the long serving table. There were some amazing dishes made with Hawai’i Island Goat Dairy goat cheese and local Hamakua Mushrooms, and Ka’u coffee and Big Island Candies and more.

It is absolutely amazing what Chef Alan can do on a portable gas burner.

This was a shrimp, olive and tomato concoction. Is your mouth watering?

The serving line. There was even more food around on the other side, too, that doesn’t show here.

Richard thanked everyone for being there and talked about why Alan had brought us together, and then Richard’s grandson Kapono said a blessing in Hawaiian and English. And then we ate. And ate.

There was also a PBS crew present, taping the whole thing. They were following Chef Alan around taping a Chefs Afield program, which will air next year. There was a lot going on.

It was really a terrific evening. From the reason we were all there – because Chef Alan has such respect for, and such connections with, his farmer friends, and thanks them with such an incredible feast – to the new connections as restaurant folk and farmers got to know and appreciate each other, talk story and eat and laugh together. It was a fun, delicious, boisterous event where everybody seemed to be enjoy the food, the setting outside under the big tent, talking, the company.

A huge mahalo to Chef Alan and all his employees, who prepared such a tremendous feast and also created such a wonderful, memorable gathering.